I’m delighted by the velocity of money as it whistles through the windows <br />of Lower East Side <br />Delighted by skyscrapers rising the old grungy apartments falling on <br />84th Street <br />Delighted by inflation that drives me out on the street <br />After all what good’s the family farm, why eat turkey by thousands every <br />Thanksgiving? <br />Why not have Star Wars? Why have the same old America?!? <br />George Washington wasn’t good enough! Tom Paine pain in the neck, <br />Whitman what a jerk! <br />I’m delighted by double digit interest rates in the Capitalist world <br />I always was a communist, now we’ll win <br />an usury makes the walls thinner, books thicker & dumber <br />Usury makes my poetry more valuable <br />my manuscripts worth their weight in useless gold - <br />Now everybody’s atheist like me, nothing’s sacred <br />buy and sell your grandmother, eat up old age homes, <br />Peddle babies on the street, pretty boys for sale on Times Square - <br />You can shoot heroin, I can sniff cocaine, <br />macho men can fite on the Nicaraguan border and get paid with paper! <br />The velocity’s what counts as the National Debt gets higher <br />Everybody running after the rising dollar <br />Crowds of joggers down broadway past City Hall on the way to the Fed <br />Nobody reads Dostoyevsky books so they’ll have to give a passing ear <br />to my fragmented ravings in between President’s speeches <br />Nothing’s happening but the collapse of the Economy <br />so I can go back to sleep till the landlord wins his eviction suit in court.<br /><br />Allen Ginsberg<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/velocity-of-money/
